by Clint Thomsen

GUEST COLUMNIST

For a guy who's always longing for the "good old days," I have both feet securely planted in the digital age. It's my way of living a balanced life, I suppose. When my wife compiles a "honey-do" list, she knows the only way it will make it into my cerebral database is if she e-mails it to me. Since the dawn of the online era, I've become something of a Web nut, operating on the notion that you don't really need to know something -- you just need to know how to Google it.

Though the talent for finding information online isn't unique, my roundabout way of finding things that were never lost in the first place may be. An example of that may be my embarrassingly drawn-out search for a local historian. After purchasing the Utah Historical Society's "A History of Tooele County" several years ago, I scoured the Internet for an e-mail address for the book's author, Ouida Blanthorn. After three years of intermittent online searching, I broke down and looked her up in the white pages only to find out that she lived in my neighborhood.

Something similarly ironic happened last week as I was planning for a pre-Easter fossil hunt in the Lakeside Mountains. I vaguely remembered reading a pamphlet somewhere detailing the location of a collection site. When a day's search through old papers turned up nothing, I turned to the Internet. After an hour of feverish Googling, I finally found an online version. The publication was the September 1997 edition of Survey Notes published by the Utah Geological Survey. The author of the fossil collecting article was none other than Mark Milligan, the UGS geologist I regularly consult with for these articles, and a person I had e-mailed earlier that day.

Given my clumsy real-world track record, the boys and I headed for the Lakeside Mountains with a muted optimism, fully expecting to make unwitting circles around a fossil jackpot and come home empty-handed. Even if we didn't discover fields of horn coral, the hike alone would be worth the trip. We took the Delle exit from I-80 and followed a combination of paved and dirt roads to the base of Black Mountain.

The weather was, as 4-year-old Weston fittingly described it, "fake spring." The sun's cheery rays were intercepted and foiled by a biting wind that I feared would tear my car doors off. We started our hike near an old mine shaft and began climbing straight up the south face of the mountain with 6-year-old Bridger in the lead.

Bridger heads most of our hikes, partly because I want to teach him how to read trail markers and topography, but partly because of his enthusiasm for exploring. Bridger's very being is diametrically opposed to anything requiring work -- he told me he wants to be a beach bum when he grows up so he can just "relax on the beach all day." But give the boy a mountain trail and he'll happily labor upward until the sun goes down.

The prospect of fossil discovery put an extra spring in his step that day. For some reason, this area is a hot spot for invertebrate fossils -- crinoids, bi-valve seashells, and horn coral in particular. I noticed many fossils on the way up, but we intended to wait until our descent to collect any -- so as to avoid climbing the mountain with rock-filled pockets. We stopped to rest on a large limestone slab and I scanned the vast desert below, wondering what made this desolate mountainside such a popular final resting place for ancient sea creatures.

"It's a combination of a few things," Mark Milligan told me later. He explained that to understand why parts of Utah are so fossil-rich, we must look at ancient geology. Rewind past the great Lake Bonneville, past the formation of the mountain ranges and even the age of the dinosaurs to the Mississippian Period -- roughly 350 million years ago -- when "here" technically wasn't here ... yet.

The land that would one day be Utah was still creeping toward its current position on the globe. Prehistoric Utah was more equatorial -- a tropical place covered mostly by shallow seas. Sea lilies, shellfish, and coral flourished in these seas and huge populations lived and died along reefs that are now thick limestone ledges in the area. Organisms that were covered in sediment shortly after death were preserved and, as Milligan writes, "Locked in the rock's matrix."

"I got one!" Weston ran toward his brother carrying a horn coral embedded in a small boulder. Bridger examined the cow-horn-shaped fossil and handed it back.

"Definitely save that one, West."

It wasn't long before both boys' pockets were stuffed and they began filling mine. By the time we reached our car, Weston had emptied his pockets and Bridger's stash had been refined to a select few specimens.

The most satisfying finds are things that give you blisters and make you work to unearth. The history of these fossils is amazing. Rocks are one thing. But to lift a rock and discover a once-living creature inside it is a remarkable experience. They lived here before here was here -- their short aquatic lives an iota compared to the millions of years they've rested silent, set in stone on these forsaken mountains, waiting for us to come along and discover them.

Clint Thomsen is a Stansbury Park resident who grew up climbing mountains, wandering desert paths and exploring Utah's wilds. He may be contacted via his Web site at www.bonnevillemariner.com.